National Power Analysis of ASEAN Member States with Entropy-Weight-Based ARAS During 2017-2021

ASEAN is an important economy where aggregate gross domestic product of ten ASEAN Member States (AMSs) amounted to US$3.0 trillion and marked the union as the fifth-largest global economy. This study evaluated national power levels of all of the 10 AMSs and ranked them. National power is important to rank countries. This study evaluated national power of AMSs through using MCDM techniques entropy weight-based ARAS. Results show that in terms of national power Singapore and Indonesia are in the 1st group; Thailand in the 2nd group; Vietnam 3rd group; Malaysia and Philippines 4th group; Cambodia, Lao PDR, Brunei, and Myanmar are in the last group. This analysis shows that, each ASEAN member country contributed to the union an important added value in either finance, energy, infrastructure, education. This underlines that ASEAN is a powerful union strengthening the foundation for a prosperous and peaceful community of Southeast Asian nations by accelerating regional economic growth as officially aimed. In academic literature, there is limited number of comparative studies conducted on ASEAN countries where the comparisons have focused solely on only a single factor. Moreover, the literature does not contain any comparative analyses of ASEAN countries in terms of national power. This research constitutes pioneering research of the National Power of the ASEAN countries. Furthermore, it adds significant value to the existing body of literature by conducting a comprehensive analysis of 1586 indicators segmented into thirteen principal factors.